STIMUSURE · Simultaneous magnetic brain stimulation and measurement
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-08-18 → 2024-02-15
- EU contribution
- €224,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Simultaneous magnetic brain stimulation and measurement
STIMUSURE aimed to develop the first magnetoencephalography (MEG) sensor compatible with simultaneous transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). TMS is the most precise non-invasive brain stimulation method, and MEG is the most precise non-invasive brain recording technique. Combining the two would allow for more precise functional brain imaging and enable development of tools that would help us understand the functional connectivity between brain regions. STIMUSURE developed an optically pumped magnetometer (OPM) sensor prototype for MEG. The developed sensor could both withstand TMS pulses (peak magnetic field 10,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field) and record weak magnetic brain magnetic fields (typical magnetic field less than 1/100,000,000 times the Earth's magnetic field, or about one trillionth of the peak field during TMS). The project, however, could not reach the aim of recording MEG signal from the human brain shortly after TMS pulses as the residual magnetic fields of the TMS coil could not be reduced by the required factor of 1,000,000,000,000 sufficiently fast, taking over 0.05 s rather than the desired below 0.01 s to suppress the residual field after each TMS pulse. To solve this technical limitation would require development of better TMS hardware. The project did, however, result in the first intrinsic optically pumped magnetic gradiometer for human use.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Current methods for directly measuring the connectivity between brain regions are lacking. A causal measurement of a functional connection between two brain regions requires stimulation of the first region whilst measuring the response from the other. Stimulation with high spatio-temporal resolution can be delivered with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), but there are no suitable methods for simultaneously measuring the response with high spatio-temporal resolution. The state-of-the-art functional neuroimaging modalities have either too low spatial resolution, too low temporal resolution, or, in case of magnetoencephalography (MEG), are considered incompatible with TMS. With STIMUSURE, we aim to solve this incompatibility issue between TMS and MEG and build the first TMS–MEG device. During this two-year project, I will design magnetic shielding to enable TMS inside a magnetically shielded room (MSR) and build TMS-compatible resilient optically pumped magnetometers (OPM) based on nonlinear magneto-optical rotation (NMOR) technique. Unlike earlier ultra-sensitive magnetic field sensors, these NMOR-OPM sensors can tolerate the magnetic field pulses due to TMS. Ultimately, such a device would allow accurate measurement of the functional connectivity and quantifying its task-specific modulation, which would benefit both cognitive neuroscience and the study of brain disorders.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM · BirminghamCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union